Friday, November 30, 2012

Custer, Bluster, and diminished luster

As the old saying goes, "Denial is a river in Egypt", and the
Republicans are still somewhere between the Gaza Strip and Benghazi in
their river of deep denial.
They would have you believe that Mitt Romney lost because he was
not a good enough snake oil salesmen. It apparently does not matter to
them that the snake oil he was selling was more like cyanide for the
middle class than castor oil, which is always good for what ails you.
The voters refused to drink the Kool Aid.
In the end, as it turns out, the American people were just not as
stupid as the Republicans thought. They couldn't be bought. They
couldn't be bamboozled, and they would not let their votes be
suppressed. They showed up when it really mattered, and it did matter.
Elections always matter. They also have consequences.
We have seen the great wealth of this country be disproportionately
husbanded by those at the top of the scale in ways that are reminiscent
of the old Robber baron days. One joke making the rounds is that the
CEO of Hostess twinkies calls a final meeting with the union boss and
one representative worker. There are a dozen Twinkies on the table. The
CEO walks off with 11 of the twinkies and says to the employee, " You'd
better watch out for that union guy, or he'll eat most of your
twinkie".
There are the greedy pizza barons who live in multi million dollar
mega mansions, but are threatening to lay off their employees if they
have to invest 12 cents per pizza of their profit in employee health
care. There are the coal barons who are laying off their miners because
they didn't work hard enough to produce , not coal, but votes, for the
one percenter agenda.
It is reminiscent of the slaveholder mentality which caused us to
take up arms against one another to defend the right of some men to
enslave others in pursuit of profit. Has our civil war never really
ended? What's wrong with this picture? Who is painting our political
landscape?
The answer is not surprising. It is the small cadre of omnipotent
oligarchs who place their greed above the good of the planet and their
fellow human beings. They have tried to buy their way into the think
tanks and the universities to manipulate the national agenda, and to
deny anything or anyone who stands in the way of their unbridled self
aggrandizement and hubristic hegemony. They have sprinkled the fairy
dust of social issues among the great unwashed to insure that people
vote against their own economic issues. They have tried to manipulate
the numbers of those who vote, so that their agenda is vouchsafed for
their undemocratic plutocratic dominance.
They have failed to achieve success on the national level, but they
have achieved some degree of success in manipulating the Congress and
many state legislatures to champion their causes. They have done so by
rigging the bidding process and drawing the lines of The Congressional
and state legislative districts in such a way as to insure their
success. They have further undermined democracy by opening up the flood
gates of political bribery, ala Citizens "Un-United". They are acting
like the Joker in a Batman movie sequel, and there seems to be no
stopping point. It is a far flung and semi successful conspiratorial
effort to bend the will of the majority to advance their cause, and the
real joke is that they have done so while invoking the concept of
liberty and justice for all. That is the ultimate irony, and the joke is
on us.
Give me you tired, your poor, your weary, your befuddled masses,
and we shall manipulate them to our advantage, and crush any hopes they
might have to climb the socioeconomic ladder. Their philosophy is ' I've
got mine the hell with you, and if you try to climb up into this boat
on that rope ladder, I'll Step on your fingers". The other side's
philosophy is more like " I've got mine, how can I help you get yours"!
The American people are not stupid. They have made their choice.
It is now up to the losers to show some grace and some common sense, and
to remember that there are still many more things that bind us together
than divide us. The American dream still beckons for us all. Clearly,
we need to trim the budget, and pay down the deficit as well. The
solvency solution is broader than just raising taxes on the well to do.
But, If the Custer-like last stand of a defeated Republican agenda
really is to hold out against tax hikes for the top two per cent of the
country, the moral bankruptcy of that position will end up bankrupting
us all. Lord have mercy. We deserve better than that.

Monday, November 26, 2012

PITTSBURG, Kan. —
To secede or not secede should not be the question. Whether ’tis nobler
to suffer the indignity of losing an election, without much recourse
for the next four years, or to just throw in the towel, or move to
Canada is not the reality of choice we citizens face.

The real challenge lies in finding ways to meet in the middle and avoid driving off the cliff like Thelma and Louise.

I am old. I have actually lived through and voted in 11 presidential
elections. Sometimes I have been happy about the results, and sometimes I
have been sad. As I told my students, sometimes you are the windshield,
and sometimes you’re the bug. Elections have winners and losers
(usually), and elections do have consequences. Majority rule does indeed
mean majority rule.

Sometimes I have even been downright indignant about the result, as in
2000, when I felt that the real winner of the contest was denied the
right to take office by a Supreme Court 5-4 intervention that was
unprecedented, unwarranted and, I think, ultimately unwise.

But I never threatened to secede from the union. It took me nearly a
year to accept the leadership of the presidential annointee of 2000, and
only when our nation was challenged in a direct and unimaginable way on
Sept. 11 did I rally, emotionally, behind our politically appointed
president. But rally I did. So did many of my fellow doubting Thomases
who questioned the ascendancy of George W. Bush. For better or for
worse, he was the only president we had, and I had to learn to accept
that fact. Whether he achieved office as a result of electile
dysfunction or mendacious manipulation of the electoral process was no
longer the issue. There was reason to unite, and go forward. Just as
there is today.

At least today there is no doubt about the result of the election, no
doubt about the result. It is clear who won, with a solid majority,
albeit not a landslide. Most elections are never decided by landslide
votes; they are more often a 50-plus to 49-minus situation. The
difference in this last election involved more than 3.5 million popular
votes, and 126 electoral votes. In the end, it wasn’t even close. No
need for a recount. No hanging chads, No butterfly ballots. No court
manipulation of the results. There was a clear winner.

In terms of coming to grips with the enormities of the challenges we as
a nation face, the longer we kick the can down the road, the more
perilous becomes our predicament. Failing to address and solve the
issues — of entitlement reform, tax reform, climate change, energy
independence and educational backsliding — will have far-reaching
consequences for the hegemony of our great nation. We will either
continue to lead or slide into the status of a back-bencher wannabe
country whose best times are past and whose future is unsecured. That is
the choice we face.

Much of the energy of the opposition party for the past four years has
been focused on denying the legitimacy of the re-elected leader we have.
The strategy was to hope he would fail and to trip up his efforts to
succeed at every turn, even if it resulted in tripping up the country
itself, temporarily. Help was on the way (they thought). Well, it didn’t
happen, and we now have the same president for the next four years, and
it’s time for the opposition to suck it up and deal, and live to fight
another day. We all need to take a deep breath and not waste time on
silly things like threatening to secede.

There are even some citizens on the other side of the spectrum who
would be happy to see the red states of the former confederacy and cow
country just go away. They are just as wrong as their
secession-threatening brethren. In the end, we are still “E Pluribus
unum,” one from many. Let’s just remember that. Our partisan thorns will
surely resurface four years hence, but for now, in the immortal words
of Rodney King: “Can’t we all just get along?”

Monday, November 19, 2012

Blinded by partisan hubris

The highlight of election night for me was
when Karl Rove, an on-air host for Fox TV, publicly challenged the
decision of the Fox News analysts that President Barack Obama had won
Ohio, and thus the election.
Not so quick! Rove even got one of
his co-anchors to lead the charge against the Fox News decision desk.
They were, in effect, demanding a recount.
If nothing else, this
points out the dangers of trying to serve two masters. Rove was posing
as a pundit, but acting as a partisan — and a partisan who was totally, especially financially, invested in a Republican victory.
His
two super PAC s — American Crossroads, and the dark super PAC
Crossroads GPS, the one where we never get to find out where the money
came from — spent upward of $300 million on organizing and on buying
ads, mostly for naught.
Perhaps that is why Karl could not see the forest for the trees. He was blinded by the light of his own partisan hubris.
He
was shell-shocked to see the reality of losing that was staring him in
the face. The reality that he, Karl Rove, boy genius and Bush's brain,
was wrong. Not just wrong, but profoundly and completely wrong in his
assessment of the state of the campaign, and the election.
The indelible image of the Wicked Witch of the West comes to mind: "I'm melting! I'm melting!"
Or
perhaps an even better analogy would be that of the Great Wizard of Oz
trying to crank away behind his velvet curtain, saying, "The great and
powerful Oz has spoken!" while all the while Toto was nipping at his
heels, and pulling back the curtain for all to see the Great Wizard in
his diminished glory.
Face the facts, Karl. Obama now owns the
presidential megaphone for the next four years. If he plays his cards
and utilizes his bully pulpit right, he could be every bit as much a
transformational figure in American politics as was Ronald Reagan.
Tuesday
night, on national TV, the time had come for Rove to face his moment of
truth —the truth of his failure and its enormous consequences. Yet he
just couldn't do it, and his reluctance to accept the reality of the
moment apparently helped to delay Mitt Romney's concession speech.
Ultimately,
sanity prevailed. Romney conceded, and eloquently so. The need to heal
the nation and move forward trumped Rove's clinging to his charts and
his convictions, while reality was knocking ever more loudly at his
front door.
America has indeed arrived at Karl Rove's Crossroads.
The American people have chosen a road diverging in the woods. That, at
last, has made all the difference.
Time to move past your own
crossroads, Karl, and get on with the business of fixing the future of
the body politic in this great country.
Forward! Not backward, and not sideways. Forward.
As Lee Iacocca so famously put it, "Time to lead, follow, or get the heck out of the way."
Move over, Karl. The train has left the station, and you are no longer on board.